Kaivalya Upanishad #9

Before entering the sutra, let us understand a few foundational words of the sutra.
The first foundational word here is: antahkaran. There is a little difficulty with antahkaran. For what we commonly call antahkaran is not antahkaran. And the true antahkaran is something we almost never come to know.
Whom do we call antahkaran?
A man sets out to steal. He lifts his foot to steal; inside, a voice says: Do not steal, stealing is a sin. A man goes to eat meat; within, a voice says: Do not eat meat, meat-eating is bad. Someone goes into a tavern; within, a voice says: Do not drink. This voice we call our conscience. But this is not antahkaran. This is society’s voice within us, not our own. It is not the voice of our soul. It is society’s schooling, society’s instruction. If you were born in a vegetarian household and from childhood heard that meat-eating is sin, meat-eating is evil, then only when you eat meat will your so-called conscience say: Bad, sinful, don’t do it. It is not your voice—because in a meat-eating house this voice is never heard.
If we call this antahkaran, we will have to accept that there are many kinds of antahkaran in the world. Then we would have to admit that God’s inner voice speaks in many tones—telling some to eat meat and others not to eat meat. This variation arises from the variations in social rules; it is not the antahkaran’s voice.
The day the voice of antahkaran is heard, and antahkaran becomes available, that day its voice is one and the same in every corner of existence. There are not two voices. There is no Hindu antahkaran and Muslim antahkaran and Christian or Jain antahkaran. But what we call conscience differs for Hindu, for Jain, for Buddhist; even among Hindus it differs for Brahmin, Kshatriya, Shudra.
Society has been very clever. Before we can come to know what our inner voice is, society installs a voice inside and convinces us this is our inner voice. Society has its compulsion, its reason. So blaming society is futile—society has its own predicament. The true inner antahkaran is not found by everyone, and if society does not produce some substitute conscience, man will fall to the level of the animal. Society cannot leave it to you—‘when you discover antahkaran, until then we will leave you free’—for fear that you may become wholly animal-like. Far from seeking, the time may pass and then even society may no longer be able to implant its conscience in you.
Hence, wherever religion’s influence has slackened, wherever family training has weakened, wherever education has been taken over by value-neutral governments, there the true voice of antahkaran does not arise, and even the fake conscience disappears. Man begins to live in a license that is almost below the human. Society has its compulsion. You cannot be trusted. Therefore, before you search for your antahkaran, society manufactures a substitute conscience inside you.
Every society fashions it differently, because each society’s understanding, belief, tradition, and culture are different. In one society, it is unthinkable to marry a cousin. In another, it is not only permissible, it is preferred; until a cousin is found, to marry elsewhere is considered a waste. It depends on society’s sanction—society’s sanction being the outcome of thousands of years of specific geographic, historical, cultural conditioning.
There are tribes in India—in Rajasthan—where the tradition has been that a boy cannot be married until he is adept at theft. The bride’s family will ask: How many thefts has the boy done? How many dacoities? Has he ever been to jail? If he has never stolen, never raided, never gone to jail—who will give a daughter to such a good-for-nothing!
There are societies of thieves. There theft is a rule, skill in theft is a qualification. The Pakhtoons on Pakistan’s frontier... A friend of mine traveled through Pakhtunistan. He told me that when they entered the Pakhtoon areas, they were warned: never drive a jeep after dusk, because young Pakhtoon boys often make a target of drivers. My friend asked, But we have quarrelled with no one, why would they target us? He was told, It’s not about enmity—they are learning to aim; a driver passes, a vehicle passes, they fire. If one can shoot a bird for target practice, what harm in targeting a man to learn? And since eventually they will have to deal with men, why involve the birds in between? Better to learn to place the shot where it belongs. Yet a Pakhtoon boy will feel no prick of conscience, for in his society it is not a question at all.
In Japan, suicide is an honorable act. If someone fails in a duty, it is considered decorous to commit suicide at once—an affair of honor, a moral act. And the Japanese conscience says: Do it now. If you don’t, it is a crime. So harakiri is respectable there. Nowhere else. To us it may seem strange. Yet here in our country, among the Jains, Santhara is respected: if someone, through fasting, with discipline, with dharma and with meditation, consciously leaves the body, the Jains do not call it suicide. It is Santhara, and greatly honored—for the person has renounced the body rightly. But in any other country it would be taken as suicide; before the law, he would be a criminal.
If we look at the world’s customs, we will find millions of consciences. These are not antahkaran. The antahkaran within every person is one. Its voice is exactly the same; its tone is one. What we hear within are society’s tones. And we start implanting society’s tone in the child from the time he knows nothing. What we teach, he learns.
Scientists say that before seven years of age a person learns seventy-five percent of what he will need to live. Thus the conscience is almost entirely formed within seven years, and then changing it is very difficult. Because it becomes the base; upon it the person stands; upon it the whole building of life is erected. Whenever he acts, a voice arises from that conscience. If something goes against it, the voice says: Don’t. Society creates this conscience as a double arrangement.
Society frames outer law so that people cannot do wrong. But no matter how skillfully the outer law is made, more skillful criminals always appear. After all, men make the laws; men discover how to slip past them and commit crimes. However strict the outer arrangement, it cannot deliver from crime. So society makes a second arrangement: it fabricates an inner conscience. Let the fear of law stop you from outside, and let your own inner voice stop you from within: Do not, it is sin.
One can escape law, but to escape the condemnation of one’s conscience is difficult. Therefore the man who obeys conscience society honors; the one who does not is disrespected. The one who obeys is awarded the wealth of merit; the one who does not is given sin. The obedient are lured with heaven; the disobedient are punished with hell. This is the inner arrangement.
So there is one court without, which restrains from outside, and one court within, belonging to society, which restrains from within. Between the two the individual is clamped, so that he may not go astray. It may be he is saved from wrongdoing; but being saved from wrong is not to become good. It may be he cannot become immoral between these two arrangements; but not being immoral is not to be moral. It may be he is not a criminal or antisocial; but not being antisocial and not being criminal is not to be religious. This is merely a system of prohibition.
There is no reason to assume that the one who does not do evil therefore does good. In truth, the man who wants to do evil but cannot because of these outer and inner social arrangements will seek other ways to do it. If one door is blocked, he will find another; he will circle around and find a path and do his evil. Yes, its form may change, its manner may change, its name may change.
But what is suppressed will find a way to explode. It becomes like a poison inside, and erupts somewhere as a boil. Because of this, humanity has become deeply sick. The immoral suffer; society punishes them. If society cannot punish, the man’s own socially manufactured conscience fills him with self-condemnation, guilt, a sense of crime, inferiority—this too is punishment. But those we call moral—who escape both the court and self-condemnation—become afflicted within with countless mental illnesses.
The greatest knower of this century—and of the whole history of humanity—of the mind and its diseases, Sigmund Freud, has said that so long as the effort to make man moral continues, there can be no freedom from mental illness. It is a dangerous statement—but the statement of a knower, who, having seen, studied, analyzed, and treated hundreds of thousands of mental patients, concluded that as long as the attempt to make man moral goes on, no way is visible to be free of mental disease. We suppress evil from one side, and it starts emerging from another. And remember: when it comes from another side it is more distorted, more perverted; its natural path is blocked. Often, when you stop one illness, it bursts forth as ten—like damming a stream so that it breaks out in ten channels.
People would ask Freud: What, then, is the remedy? Should we stop making man moral? Freud said: If we stop, civilization and culture will be lost. And if we are to keep civilization and culture, we must enforce morality; but the result will be that man remains mentally afflicted, remains ill. The more civilized a society, the more mental illness increases. Its quantity rises with civilization. If civilization is to be maintained, its inevitable fruit must be borne.
But this is a sad conclusion, depressing to the heart. Neither of these alternatives is worth choosing—that man should become uncivilized, uncultured, animal-like; the heart does not accept this. Nor does it accept that the whole earth should become one mad-house, that slowly people become so full of mental disease as today has happened. In the most civilized countries today, the demand is increasingly for psychiatrists rather than general physicians. Ordinary illnesses have become ordinary; their cures are known. It is the illnesses of the mind that have become abnormally heavy; their cure appears difficult. And when we search for cures, the complexities we find are frightening.
In the last twenty-five years, psychologists have concluded: to cure a single madman, earlier they treated him alone. Now they say: we can cure him only if we cure his entire family, because his madness arises from the family. And now psychologists also say: even curing the family—what will it do? That family is part of a group, and the group itself is full of some madness; therefore the family becomes mad, therefore one member becomes mad. The interesting observation: in a group of twenty families, the family that is most sensitive and honest will go mad first. Within that family, the person who is most sensitive and honest will go mad first. Because the dishonest finds ways to avoid madness: he says one thing and does another; he does not go mad. But if one is utterly honest—does exactly what he says—he falls into trouble. A great difficulty indeed.
All ethics says that conduct and thought should be one. But we do not find people whose conduct and thought are one. Even of those who appear so, we lack scientific means to test them; if we could, we’d discover they are not one. If they truly were, and had chosen to obey society’s conscience, they would go mad. If they are not mad, then somewhere they have arrangements, back doors from which their madness escapes.
This conscience is not the antahkaran of the sutra—let this be the first point. The antahkaran spoken of in this sutra is that which arises when one removes this social conscience entirely and looks within. Stripping off all the layers laid by society, putting away all that society has imposed, all the samskaras it has created—ensuring even their shadows do not fall—when one looks inside, then for the first time one comes to know that antahkaran which we have received as naturally as eyes, as heart, as intelligence. It is an essential organ of life. When the purity of that antahkaran comes into our awareness, when the art of hearing its voice is learned, then there is no gap between thought and conduct. Then one never says: I know what is right, but I do something else. What is felt as right, happens.
Socrates said: knowledge is conduct. He is speaking of that knowing which arises from antahkaran. There is then no difference between knowing and doing. If there is a difference, know that the conscience you appeal to is not your antahkaran. The experience of that inner antahkaran becomes like knowing fire—knowing that the hand gets burned, one does not put it in. One never says: I know the hand will burn, yet what to do—I keep thrusting it in. The man moves by that voice as one who needs to leave a house exits through the door; he doesn’t say: I know where the door is, but what to do—some weakness makes me go through the wall, and my head breaks. He does not say: I know what is right, yet I do wrong. For in that state of antahkaran, knowing and being, knowing and doing, are synonymous. One does not say: I know anger is bad, but what to do, it happens. I know I shouldn’t abuse—it is bad—I repent afterwards, but what to do, it happens. This state of our mind shows that our doing is coming from somewhere deeper than our understanding.
Our upper conscience—taught by society—says anger is bad, and I know it is bad; but deeper, my personality is more powerful than that knowing. Anger happens, and I am helpless. There is one thing the shallowly conscientious can do—and must do: repentance. I will do it, then I will repent. And the strange thing is: no matter how much repentance you do, what has been done does not change. Today I rage, in the evening I repent; tomorrow morning I rage again, tomorrow evening I repent again. Repentance becomes an integral part of anger.
We usually think the repentant man is a good man—poor fellow, at least he does penance. Today anger happens, repentance happens; slowly, as his understanding of repentance grows, perhaps anger will stop. The truth is exactly the opposite. One does not repent to stop anger; one repents to wipe off the wound anger has given to one’s ego. Repentance cleans the stain; one returns to the old pedestal from which one can again be angry.
I think I am a good man—and everyone thinks so of himself. I think I never get angry; if sometimes I do, it is because others create such situations. Or I do it to improve others. We create any number of rationalizations to explain ourselves. Then I get angry; then I am hurt. My ego becomes mean before my own eyes. Where is that good man? Am I not good? But I was angry. The image of myself as a good man is fractured; repentance is the means to repair it. I repent: I did wrong—very wrong. I should not have done it. It happened. It was fated, destiny, a swoon came, I lost awareness, circumstances were such—through a thousand excuses I repent. I concede I did wrong.
Do you understand what this means?
It means: I am, by nature, still a good man. Something wrong happened; I am not wrong. There is a great difference between being a bad man and a bad act happening. A tree has one dry leaf; the tree itself is not dry. I am essentially good. Among a million acts, one act went wrong; that does not make me bad. By repentance I pluck the dry leaf; the tree is green again. I reaffirm: I am a good man; one bad thing happened; this does not make me bad. Why would it not? I have even repented. Do bad people repent? I can even ask forgiveness, seek pardon. But I am only trying to regain the same position I had before the anger. The moment I reach it, I am back where I can be angry again. I will be angry again. The conscience we take as conscience only leads us into repression, repentance, and distortion. It is useful to society. It allows a little control.
The antahkaran spoken of in this sutra is the antahkaran untouched by society—the voice of my own inner consciousness, my own spontaneous tone. Religion is the search for antahkaran.
What is my antahkaran?
Jesus was halting outside a village. The villagers brought a woman and said: She is an adulteress, and our scripture says she should be stoned to death. What do you say? Jesus knew that scripture. He had heard it since childhood. He belonged to that community. They had brought the matter deliberately, for they wanted to trap him: If Jesus said the scripture is wrong, they would stone Jesus; if he said the scripture is right, they would stone the woman before him and then ask: What of your teachings? You say: If someone strikes one cheek, turn the other. You say: Love your enemy. You say: Resist not evil. What of that?
Jesus closed his eyes. He opened them again—this brief closing and opening was his descent into antahkaran—and he said: The scripture is right: the adulterer should be stoned. But I say to you, one thing the scripture omitted: the one who throws the first stone must be he who has never committed adultery, nor entertained the thought of it. Now pick up your stones. The leaders, who were standing in front, began to slip to the back. Jesus said: Let no one slip away, for today we must execute this woman. Let that man step forward who can say: I have not thought of adultery, I have not done it. The crowd melted away.
In a little while, in that lonely place, none remained but Jesus and the woman. She fell at his feet and said: Punish me. To them I could have said I am no adulteress; to you—how can I say it? To them I could argue they wrong me; with you—how can I? Punish me. Jesus said: Who am I to punish you? He closed his eyes again, opened them, and said to the woman: Go. For only before the Ultimate can your case be decided. Who am I to judge? This is the voice of antahkaran.
Jesus’ repeated glancing within—his antahkaran must have said something that any true antahkaran anywhere would say. What right has one who himself has been adulterous to call another adulterous? But Jesus had not been adulterous; he could have stoned her. Yet he again looked within and said: Who am I to judge you? I did not make you; I did not give you life; I am not the master of your life—how can I be your judge? I say only this: Do not become the judge of others. Go.
This is not society’s voice. No scripture writes such a thing. No society has taught this. This is an unlearned, spontaneous upsurge. Ask Buddha, the same voice will arise; ask Mahavira, the same. It is not the voice of persons; it is the voice of the impersonal, the all-pervading consciousness hidden within persons. Its name is antahkaran. It must be sought. We possess it, but it is hidden—not manifest. Since we are, and there is consciousness, consciousness has its own speech, its own tone; but it is hidden. What we hear emerging within are the voices others have planted. They are gramophone-record voices. Society has cut grooves within us; the needle of the intellect runs on them; a sound arises—this is bad, that is good.
As for this good and bad—one who has the capacity to go within and the courage to descend to that place which was mine even on the day before I was born; that place which is mine in deep sleep when even dreams vanish; that place which will be mine when I die, when the body decays and perishes—if one seeks that place, that is antahkaran.
Let me suggest a process of seeking. Whenever within you there arises: This is bad, that is good; this is right, that is not—observe: Is this a reflection of the society of your birth, or is it your own discerning?
Shankara took sannyas very young. His mother was old—he was born late; his father had died. The old mother could not gather courage to let him take sannyas. One day, while he was swimming, a crocodile seized his leg. The whole village rushed to help; his mother too. Shankara shouted: I can pray to the crocodile and hope it will release me. But about sannyas—if you consent, I feel the crocodile will let go. Seeing that sannyas was better than death—and nothing less would do—she promised. Perhaps some deep friendship existed between Shankara and that crocodile—remnants of past lives—the crocodile let go. Shankara was saved and took sannyas.
But as he departed, the mother asked one promise: You must perform my last rites. This was a dilemma in those days. Where would Shankara be roaming? Journeys were on foot, the whole land to wander! A beggar. Yet he promised. Later, when his mother fell ill, word came; Shankara hurried. His disciples and companions dissuaded him: What mother, what father? A sannyasin has no parents! The promises were given in ignorance. The world is maya, you yourself say so. What promise, what word—and who is the fulfiller? All is a dream, you say. Shankara closed his eyes, sat in meditation; then rose and said: No, I must go. The world may be maya, relations false, but something within me says: I must go.
A doubt could arise that this was not pure antahkaran; it could have been social imprint: promise given to the mother; she is dying; the last moment—social conditioning. But soon his companions realized it was not society’s voice.
He reached the village. It was a Nambudiri Brahmin family—the highest Brahmins of the South. The village refused: How can a sannyasin son perform his mother’s cremation? In a Brahmin village, a sannyasin has no mother or father. It will corrupt sannyas.
Shankara said: I shall perform the rites. No one came to help carry the bier. The mother was heavy; Shankara thin and frail. It became nearly impossible to take her to the cremation ground. Shankara closed his eyes, then drew his sword and cut the mother’s body into three parts. He carried them one by one to the burning ground. A man who can cut his mother’s body into three cannot possess society’s conscience! Friends and disciples were aghast: This is too much! What is this vow-fulfilling without bounds? Shankara said: The world is maya. The body is dead already. What difficulty in cutting the body? I asked within.
Put aside the cultural imprints that society gives—and every society gives—and slowly look within. A moment comes when it becomes clear what belongs to society and what is mine. For when one’s own voice arises, there is no opposing voice. It is single-toned. In society’s conscience, no matter what it says, a contrary voice is always present. The so-called conscience says: stealing is bad; one part says: Do it, who is watching? One part says: meat-eating is bad; another says: the whole world does it—why be the only pious one? Did you take a contract to be virtuous? Drinking is bad; but the whole world drinks. Why waste your life—drink!
One sign of the voice of antahkaran: in so-called conscience, the opposing tone is always present. In true antahkaran, there is no opposing tone. There is a single voice. As long as you can hear the clink of an opposing tone, know it is society’s implanted conscience, not the conscience given by God. The day a single voice is available... Shankara said: I will cut—he raised the sword and cut. Not for a moment did he think: Let me consider—cutting my mother’s body! Might it be violence? Matricide? What am I doing? This has never been done! No son has done it. Certainly not one like Shankara. No—he cut, burned the body, and was joyful. The work was done. A single voice.
Thereafter, throughout life, never did anyone hear that Shankara even once felt: I did something wrong. If you obey your so-called conscience, you will repent—and if you disobey it, you will also repent. This is the second sign. Obey it—you will repent. Do not steal—fine; you will repent lifelong that you missed out. Everyone else did it; the time was ripe; the opportunity came and went. So-and-so did it—not caught; so-and-so did it—became a minister; so-and-so—this and that; and we starve. Why did we get entangled in being good! If you do steal, you will also repent—self-contempt, guilt, crime will seize you: it would have been better not to do it.
The conscience that society gives produces repentance in every case, because there are two voices. You can obey only one—what of the other? It will wait and make you repent. Obey the other—this one waits and makes you repent. But by obeying the antahkaran indicated by this sutra, there is never any repentance. Never.
A third sign. The conscience we live with leaves memories, because no act is ever complete. Half of the mind stands against it, so the act remains incomplete. Even theft is done half-heartedly. Have you seen a total thief? Can you find a single person wholly dishonest? Wholly dishonest would mean: in him not even a whisper arises that it is wrong, it is bad, it should not be done. No—finding a full-fledged cheat is hard; and in a world of cheats, finding a wholly honest man is equally hard—the one in whose mind no thought arises: We could have done it—what would be lost? With the so-called conscience, memories form, because acts remain incomplete, stuck in the mind. It feels: it should have been completed. The antahkaran of this sutra leaves no memory. A total act leaves no memory. It happens—and it is gone.
A fourth and final sign: if you follow the so-called conscience, bondage of karma is created; because the act is incomplete and the memory clings to the mind and will not let go. If the act is total, there is no memory, no bondage of karma; the heart remains free. What you have done with your whole being never becomes a burden on your heart. If you ask me, I would say: what is done with a divided heart is sin; what is done with a total heart is virtue. This is my definition: the act done with a divided mind is sin—even if you build a temple. The act done with the total mind is virtue—even if it be theft. Though theft cannot be done totally, while a temple can indeed be built half-heartedly.
Let this be our first understanding of antahkaran.
The second word: Pranava—Omkar, Om.
Indian sadhana has many, many forms. Immense differences, sharp contradictions, great debates. The three great Indian streams of sadhana—Jain, Buddhist, Hindu—differ fundamentally. Hindus accept Ishvara and Atman. Jains accept only Atman, not Ishvara. Buddhists accept neither Ishvara nor Atman. Radical differences. Yet a curious thing: regarding Om the three agree. On Pranava there is no dispute. Over the smallest matters they quarrel, finding no harmony; but on the word Om there is none. It seems Om is not a matter of doctrine but of science.
And not only in India. The three great religions outside India—Judaism, Islam, Christianity—have no quarrel with Om either, though they call it Amen. The difference is only of language. Linguists say Om and Amen are one and the same sound, no difference—merely the capture of the sound in different tongues.
So I want to tell you: Om is that one word in the whole history of humanity upon which six world religions agree. They accept that there is something in it.
What is in this word?
Consider it in two or three ways. The human mind is a heap of words. What is in your mind except words? If we take all words out of you, there will be no mind. Your mind is like an onion—remove all peels, nothing remains. So is your mind—peels of words. If all words are removed, what remains? Not mind—emptiness. Just think a little: if you are left with no words, what mind remains? What remains? A cluster of words—that is mind. And through this mind we do everything—good or bad, sorrow or joy, world or liberation.
Om is a sound—calling it a word is not right, because it has no meaning. A word is that sound which has a meaning. Om is a sound without meaning—but in this sound is the essence of all fundamental sounds. A-U-M are the three primal sounds. As I said yesterday, Indian insight has a deep sense of the triad; Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh are the three aspects of life; in physics, electron, neutron, positron are the three bases of matter. Likewise, for Indian insight, A-U-M are the three bases of all language, all speech, all words. All sounds are combinations of these three. The primal three are in Om. We can say: Om is, from the standpoint of sound, the atom. The subtle atom of sound. As electron, neutron, positron compose the material atom, so A-U-M compose the atom of the mind.
Om is the atom of mind—the subtlest atom. Finer than this none can be. If we break it—as scientists say, if we break electron, neutron, positron—the atom dissolves into emptiness, nothing remains graspable, all becomes formless; yet in the breaking, immense energy is released—what we call nuclear explosion. That explosion is the releasing of the infinite energy locked between the three. A tiny atom—invisible to the eye—when split on Hiroshima, in five minutes a hundred and twenty thousand people became ash. Such force is latent in their union; when released, so much energy is discharged.
Exactly so, the Indian genius—having seen that laboring on matter leads nowhere, that even if achieved, nothing true is attained—left matter aside and worked on mind. Since it is the mind that suffers pleasure and pain, why not change the mind itself? Instead of collecting objects that bring pleasure or pain, why not transform that which experiences them? This view was born of long experience.
We gathered all things that are supposed to bring happiness, yet found: simply collecting them does not bring happiness. We set aside the things that bring sorrow; yet sorrow came from elsewhere, but did not end. In the end, we found no direct link between objects and happiness or sorrow. Objects are merely pegs. We come home and hang the coat on a peg. If there is no peg, we hang it on the door; if no door, on the window. The coat gets hung somewhere; the peg hardly matters. So break the peg or make it bigger—no difference; the coat will still hang.
The Indian mind came to know: objects are pegs, and mind hangs upon them like a coat. If the mind is unhappy, it will be unhappy upon any peg; if happy, happy upon any peg; if peaceful, peaceful upon any peg; if restless, restless upon any peg. Therefore the question is not to change pegs, but to change the mind. So the exploration of mind began. In that analysis, they found that Pranava—Om—is the atom of the mind. Can this atom also explode? If so, energy will be born from it. Can this atom undergo an explosion? Yoga says: yes. If it dissolves, if it breaks, a fire arises within—the same fire that burns a person’s ego, his karmas, his sins and virtues, his entire past, his total load, to ash. The same fire.
Now let us read the sutra:
“The wise make antahkaran the lower arani and Pranava the upper, and through the churning of these two they practice. The fire of knowledge thus born burns all faults to ash, and they are freed from bondage to the world.”
You may have seen the arani: rubbing two sticks produces fire. In those old days when this Upanishad was written, that was the common method for kindling fire. Either flints are struck, or special wooden aranis are rubbed to birth the flame.
This is a symbol. The rishi says: make antahkaran the lower stick, Om the upper; from the friction of the two, the fire arises which burns the entire past, the entire karma, the entire ignorance to ash—and one is liberated.
Om is one arani. I will speak to you of its inner utterance in a while. First, the search for antahkaran. Because in your hollow social conscience no fire can be born. It cannot become an arani. Hence I spoke so much of antahkaran. First the search for antahkaran; then the inward utterance of Om.
Om can be uttered in three ways. One, aloud—with the lips. This is outer utterance. Second, close the lips, do not use the tongue; utter only in the mind. This is the middle utterance. Third, a more inward utterance—when neither lips nor throat nor mind are used, and only Om resounds. When this third utterance becomes possible, the ultimate atomic state of Om is in your hands. And if below you have antahkaran, and with you above is this ultimate subtle quantum of Om, the friction of the two gives birth to the fire of knowledge.
First, practice Om aloud—through the lips, through the voice. Then close the lips, and utter only with the mind.
Each person takes a different time. It depends on intensity, on urgency. With how much fire—then it happens quickly. With how much density, how much thirst—then quickly it happens.
When the mental utterance becomes so natural that whatever you are doing, it goes on; even if you forget, it continues—it happens. You walk on the road—it goes on. You work—it goes on. You eat—it goes on. Slowly it becomes such that even while speaking, it continues. When it becomes so natural that even in sleep it continues—when you awake in the morning, the first remembrance is the felt continuity of the utterance; you realize it ran through the night.
Swami Rama returned from America to the Himalayas, where Sardar Puran Singh was with him. At midnight, Puran Singh awoke—suddenly the room was filled with the sound Ram... Ram... He was startled: Is Ram Tirtha awake, uttering the Name? He went—Ram Tirtha was asleep, snoring. Deep asleep, yet the sound was there. Is someone near the house? He went out with a torch—lonely forest, no one. On the veranda the sound grew faint. Returning inside, it grew strong. He understood it was in the room. But there was only one room. He looked under both beds—no one. As he bent to look, he came near Ram’s cot—the sound was stronger. He put his ear to Ram’s chest—the sound was there. To the feet—the sound was there. To the hands—the sound was there. The Name was resonating through the whole body. He was frightened, shook Ram awake: What is this? Ram said: What is there? This has been happening for a long time. At first I too was startled—was someone else doing it? What is happening? Now it has become natural. It goes on by itself. You must have been quiet enough to hear it. Sleep peacefully.
When such a state is formed, a third possibility opens. Then you need not do anything. You can set even the mind aside: I will not do it at all. I will sit silently; I will not do it—from the lips, from the mind, by intention—nothing. Suddenly you find the sound is happening. I am listening; I am not doing. When within me I become the listener, not the doer, then the ultimate atomic state of Om is available. Then Om becomes an arani. Then the explosion of Om, rubbing against the lower arani of antahkaran, burns within all that is futile. After that, the person is no longer the same. He has become other. This is the second birth. The old man is finished. There is no connection with him. Between the two there is no continuity, no thread. He is gone; this is a different man.
And until such an inner fire is lit, a person is not free of the bondage of the world.
One last thing: Existence has placed within us that key which, whenever we use, we can be free. If we do not use it, that is our responsibility.
That is all.